During the last decade inward migration put the European educational systems to the test. The large influx of migrants from different educational, economic and cultural contexts made emergency response mechanisms imperative resulting in a range of language and cultural awareness courses to promote integration. Migrants, in most situations, became a special target group of adult education with specifically tailored solutions. This gave rise to a differentiation between ‘adult education for migrants’ and ‘traditional adult education’.
What DIVERSITY project looks at?
The DIVERSITY project supports the normalisation of education and training to migrants by targeting training to manager and adult education programme planners to amend next their programme planning and delivery internal processes to more effectively facilitate migrants into a mainstream adult education lifelong learning track.
The DIVERSITY project considers managers and adult education programme planners among adult education providers as key to reaching this overarching objective. The 30-month DIVERSITY project aims to develop training resources to enable adult education for migrants to shift from the contingency approach to a more diversity-informed mainstream adult education lifelong learning approach. Such an approach would not consider migrants and refugees as special contingency/emergency cohort of adult learning participants but as a regular target group of an increasingly more diverse adult education audience.
The DIVERSITY project partners develop training guidelines designed to address the specific requirements for this organizational shift by providing a modular curriculum to assist providers to a) assess their current practices impacting on migrant participation, and b) to develop appropriate practices to realize mainstream adult education engagement of migrant learners.
DIVERSITY Key phases
A European gap analysis, coordinated by the National University of Ireland Maynooth is available, based on four national desk researches, online surveys, interviews and focus groups conducted by project partners.
A modularized training curriculum, comprising 8 key modules, highlights key points on how learning with migrants may become more diversity-informed, allowing for a more effective integration of them into the local communities.
A Pilot Delivery & Validation: Final Diversity Training across 4 partner countries will thoroughly test, evaluate and refine the curriculum reaching 100 managers and planners across Europe. HAEA is the leader partner in this phase and extensive feedback on behalf of the engaged stakeholders will provide sufficient evidence on this training qualities.
A policy recommendations paper will consolidate findings, insights and experiences from all three previous outputs in order to inform evidence-based policy formulation, provide policy recommendations and identify actionable measures for stakeholders.
The Diversity project partnership is coordinated by Niedersächischer Bund für freie Erwachsenenbildung e.V. (DE) and HAEA (GR) along with 5 more partners from Belgium, Italy, Denmark and Ireland join forces to this end.
For more information about the DIVERSITY project you may visit our site.
